Archive for the ‘OS X’ Category

I keep my worklog in VoodooPad. I do most of my code editing in TextMate. When I’m trying to understand a new chunk of code, I often need to jump around through the code base.

It’s hard to keep track of where I’ve been, so I can back out of a code path once I understand what it does. Until now I’ve just jotted down pathnames and line numbers in my worklog, so I could manually retrace my steps.

Puzzle Pieces

VoodooPad URLs. They let you inject HTML content — including hyperlinks — into an open VoodooPad document.

TextMate URLs of the form txmt://open?url=file://pathname&line=lineNum;column=colNum. Open one of these URLs and TextMate will open a window showing the specified line (and column, if specified) of the specified file.

Textmate commands and key equivalents.
TextMate lets you define custom commands and trigger them with keyboard shortcuts that you specify.

Put these all together and what do you get?

Scenario

Select some code of interest in TextMate

Type your keyboard shortcut

A hyperlink pointing to the selected code is inserted into your VoodooPad document

Later, when you want to get back to that chunk of code, just click on the hyperlink in VoodooPad. TextMate will open the document and jump to the line of code referenced by the hyperlink.

Granted, you’re probably going to edit that code someday; and then your bookmarks will break. But this is a handy way to leave a trail of breadcrumbs while you’re trying to decipher a new body of code.

Code

Here’s a Python script which implements this “Bookmark in VoodooPad” capability in TextMate. You can use it by opening TextMate’s Bundle Editor (Bundles -> Bundle Editor -> Show Bundle Editor), creating a New Command using the tool menu at the bottom left of the Bundle Editor window, and pasting it into the resulting Command(s) text area:

VoodooPad bookmarklets are very useful. But they let you paste only plaintext from your web browser into your document — until now.

VoodooPad Application URLs

VoodooPad understands application-specific URLs of the form voodoopad:description=encoded_text&page=name_of_VoodooPad_document_page. When you open one of these URLs, VoodooPad inserts the encoded text into the indicated page of the current VP document.

You can open voodoopad: URLs from other applications, such as a web browser. That’s what’s so cool about VP bookmarklets — they let you quickly select some text in your web browser and paste it into a VP document, along with other information such as the URL where the text originated.

The only problem is, the description parameter can contain only plain text. So if you’ve selected part of a web page that contains hyperlinks, those hyperlinks won’t come along for the ride.

New Feature

Gus Mueller, VoodooPad’s creator, recently released a new build. It adds a new html parameter to VoodooPad URLs. Now you can select part of a web page and transfer it as HTML into your VoodooPad document.

Gus summarized the new feature thus:

The format of the bookmarklet is like so:
voodoopad:page=junk&html=<b>hello</b>%20world!

Here’s expanded code for a JavaScript bookmarklet which takes advantage of the new parameter. It works in both Safari and Firefox 3.0.x:

Worth noting: in this snippet the html content is wrapped up in a div which has an explicit font specification. The bookmarklet is transferring a chunk of HTML, but that chunk doesn’t include any of the CSS from the original web page. So if you don’t specify a style for the wrapper div, VoodooPad will use its own default style for the current VP page. (I think that’s something like Times Roman 10px.)

“This version adds TextMate links : if you are working on your local machine and using TextMate you can click on the template paths and they will be opened in TextMate. This speeds up development time considerably!

Somethreads on the Apple discussion boards have investigated why the man pages don’t get updated. The conclusion is that Leopard installs a lot of gzip-compressed man pages without deleting the corresponding uncompressed man pages. (It may be that this is true only for upgrade installs.) A recommended workaround was to scan through the man page directories with a shell command, re-locating all uncompressed man pages which had corresponding compressed man pages.

I decided to be cowardly in doing this. Here’s a Python script which moves each uncompressed man page only if it is older than its corresponding gzipped man page.

The script must be run with superuser privileges, e.g.

$ sudo python mv_old_man_pages.py

It processes all of the man pages under /usr/share/man, moving old, uncompressed man page files to ~/tmp/old_man_pages.

I would post this to the Apple discussion forums, but it’s really overkill. The short shell scripts already posted should work fine, if you ignore the harmless error messages and process each man/man* directory manually.

I’ve just tried to compile the subversion 1.5.1 client from its two source tarballs (subversion-1.5.1-tar.bz2 and subversion-deps-1.5.1-tar.bz2). I took care to first hide the /usr/local libraries from my existing subversion installation. Even so, the compilation failed, complaining

/usr/lib/libexpat.a: No such file or directory

The workaround was to temporarily move the system’s /usr/lib/libexpat* dynamic libraries, and then to rebuild.

JavaScript Tools

The JavaScript Tools bundle helps you lint, format and compress your JavaScript code, and convert code to and from JavaScript bookmarklets.

My favorite feature: whenever you save a JavaScript file via Command-S, the bundle automatically runs it through jslint. If any errors or warnings are found, a tooltip appears which shows the number of warnings/errors.

If you run a full validation using Control-Shift-V, you’ll get a popup window showing “compilation” results — complete with syntax errors and clickable links to take you to the offending source code.

Installation

I installed under ~/Library/Application Support/. It may be better to use /Library/Application Support/.

rprr posted a workaround in the above thread which worked for me. I don’t know how to link to specific messages in the discussion thread (or whether that’s even allowed under the terms of use, egad), so here’s a recap:

1. Started Terminal. It hung up. Did Force Quit and Sent Crash report to Apple.

2. Since I had a working X11 application, I used it to open about 10 xterms using the Applications->Terminal Menu of X11.app

I’d like to do development on an ASP.NET web application which resides in a VMware Fusion shared folder. Unfortunately, as noted in the Microsoft Forums, Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition (at least) does not support hosting on a UNC share.

So, AFAICT, the only option is to do development in a local folder. To access that folder from the host operating system, it needs to be shared from the Windows VM.